God Will Know His Own

INTERNALLY DISPLACED PERSON

August 10, 2017

“What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“In the case of North Korea, God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un.” That is what Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, said in a press release.

How does he know this? He cites Romans 13. “When it comes to how we should deal with evil doers, the Bible, in the book of Romans, is very clear: God has endowed rulers full power to use whatever means necessary—including war—to stop evil . . .”

He told the Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey that he was prompted to make this statement after the President said that North Korean threats to the United States would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

Jeffress dismissed those who have qualms about this bellicose language as being unduly influenced by “mushy rhetoric” and not being “well taught in the scriptures”—proving once again my contention that, for many conservative Christians, the Sermon on the Mount is part of the Apocrypha.

What is certain is that Jeffress himself is not “well taught,” or, even worse, indifferent with regards to the readily foreseeable human costs of “taking Kim Jung Un out.” (Then again, as he told Bailey, “many evangelicals, like most Americans, really don’t pay attention to global affairs.”)

As Mark Bowden spelled out in the July/August issue of The Atlantic, they are horrific: “[With] only a few of its worst weapons, North Korea could, probably within hours [of an American first strike], kill millions,” in “one of the worst mass killings in human history.” By one estimate, the use of sarin gas alone could produce 3 to 5 million casualties. And this is only the tip of terrifying iceberg.

If the Almighty, working through His servant, the president, and his court prophets, has ordained this outcome, one can only marvel at His insouciance when it comes to the lives of non-Americans.

The truth is, Jeffress’ remarks are morally obscene and bring to mind what St. Paul wrote in Romans 2: “The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” At the same time it is oddly invigorating to see an evangelical leader reinforcing my lingering suspicions that translating the Bible into the vernacular may not have been a great idea. (For the record, that’s a joke. Mostly.)

Likewise, I give Jeffress props for his willingness to dispense with any pretense about the importance of the Just War tradition. “Whatever means necessary”: Forget about jus in bello, proportionality, non-combatant immunity, and so on. Sure, a lot of those dead Koreans will be our fellow Christians, but as someone else committed to waging God’s war against evil once said, “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.” (“Kill them all. God will know His own.”)

As Dave the Swede (not his real name) has pointed out to me, Nagasaki was not the original target on August 9, 1945, so, obviously, the United States did not intend to nearly wipe out the heart of Japanese Christianity. But, regardless of anyone’s intentions, that’s what happened.

And it will happen again across the Sea of Japan if the president exercises the “authority” Jeffress says he has.

In the years after September 11, 2001, I watched as Christian leaders, both evangelicals and Catholics, expounded on the Just War tradition. After a while it became apparent that they often employed the tradition much as the proverbial drunkard employs a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

If there was a military action taken by the U.S., at least when there was a Republican in the White House, that ran afoul of the tradition, it escaped their attention. They used phrases like “collateral damage” unironically, as if using the phrase made women and children caught in the crossfire any less dead.

When then-Cardinal Ratzinger, whom they loved when it came to the pelvic issues, said that the “concept of a ‘preventive war’ does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church” in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, they paid him no heed. What did the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Catholic Church know?

Taking their cue from torturer Jack Bauer, instead of torture victim Jesus of Nazareth, they argued from television and movie hypotheticals (the “ticking bomb” scenario) and ignored what was happening in the real world.

The net effect of this silence, rationalization, and politically driven misuse of the Just War tradition was the growing realization for many that consequentialism, not caritas, was the criterion by which the justness of war was actually measured.

What’s more, what constituted a “good consequence” was defined almost entirely in terms of American interests. When, for instance, Iraqi Christians, who, unlike their Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish neighbors, didn’t have militias to protect them, suffered the consequences of the American invasion, these people were genuinely surprised.

This time around, it doesn’t matter that, as Bowden and others have pointed out, if Pyongyang were to fire a missile at any U.S. territory, the regime would be signing its own death warrant. The United States would hit “delete” and North Korea would cease to exist.

What matters is that Americans are scared—in large measure because they have been told to be scared—and thus, just as we are willing to fight the war on drugs down to the last Mexican, some Christian leaders and their fellow court prophets are prepared to assuage their fellow citizens’ fears down to the last Korean.

If Hegel was right about people and governments never learning from history and acting on what they learned, it’s mostly because they never bothered to learn history in the first place. They certainly never learned history from the perspective of people who weren’t like them.

All of which makes it easier to overlook what “taking them out” will cost those caught in the crossfire.

Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.

Image courtesy of ronniechua at iStock by Getty Images.

Roberto Rivera is senior fellow at the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. For nearly 20 years he has been chief writer for the BreakPoint Radio commentary program. His “Internally Displaced Person” is a mostly regular column at BreakPoint.org. His writings have appeared in Touchstone, First Things, and Sojourners. He lives with his son in Alexandria, Virginia.

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If N Korea starts something by killing citizens of a foreign land, then Trump MUST do something. His statement should have been: if you attack innocents, then you force me to stop it. He would be acting as commander in chief,not the Priest, the Pope, the Rabbi.

jason taylor

In the first place America has never fought a war in which there were not Christians on the other side except against Indians and against Barbary Pirates. And so long as there are multiple polities with Christians in them, so long will there be wars with on both sides. If you criticize Nagasaki on those grounds you are being ridiculous. Not to mention you are simply being tribalistic about Christianity instead of nationalism. Either it was right or not but there being Christians there is not an argument.

In the second place collateral damage is a real thing and it is impossible to fight a war without it. Putting irony quotes around the notion does not change the fact. It was present in Augustine’s day when every passing army brought plaugue and famine, it was present in modern times when most shells dropped anywhere but the target, and days of guided weapons are in fact the closest ever gotten to it. And not knowing that is also not bothering to learn history.

If one is to demand Jus in Bello under the criteria demanded by the author one should just be a pacifist as it cannot be moral to make war at all. If one is to be pacifist one should just do so and be done with it. Because there is in fact no criterion that can possibly satisfy the author and be useful to apply in war.

HpO

This article is difficult to comment on, brother Roberto Rivera, maybe because I find the entire Christian dogma of just warfare simply vomit-inducing. Yeah, that must be it. So let me, then, just comment on the lines reading as follows that are of easier pickings, i.e. easier on the stomach than aspirin:

“The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of” – “what Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, said in a press release” – “God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un”!

The real question for me here is, Oh, really? Has it come down to that? If so, then, according to Deuteronomy 28, 1 Kings 9, Psalm 44, Isaiah 52, Ezekiel 36, and Romans 2 (from which you quoted for brother Robert Jeffress’ postcard), what 6 PRE-CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE must already be met in order for the name of God and Jesus to be blasphemed, and His people to be made fun of, by the Jesus-rejecting world out there? Let me see:

(1) Do American Evangelical Churches “obey the Lord God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes”? NO.

(2) Do American Evangelical Churches, asks God, “turn away from … keep(ing) My commandments and My statutes which I have set before (them), and go and serve other gods and worship them”? YES.

(3) TRUE OR FALSE confession of American Evangelical Churches to God: “We have not forgotten You. And we have not dealt falsely with Your covenant. Our heart has not turned back. And our steps have not deviated from Your way”. FALSE.

(4) TRUE OR FALSE confession of God to American Evangelical Churches: “My people have been taken away without cause”. FALSE.

(5) TRUE OR FALSE: When American Evangelical Churches were “living in their own land, they defiled it by their ways and their deeds … (and) with their idols. … When they came to the nations where they went, they profaned My holy name”. TRUE.

(6) Do American Evangelical Churches, asks their apostle Paul, “steal? … Do you commit adultery? … Do you rob (religious) temples? … Do you dishonor God?” YES, YES, YES, YES.